Laszlo Polgar was a Hungarian
psychologist who decided to make his children part of an educational
experiment. Polgar believed that "geniuses are made, not born" and
argued that children could achieve exceptional things if trained in
one subject from an early age. He set out to turn his children into
prodigies of whatever they showed interest in. The goal was to make
the children happy with what they achieved
Laszlo wrote a book on how to raise a genius and proved the
hypothesis by raising three chess grandmasters, two of them became
record-breakers and one became the first female to beat the top
ranked male.
He and his wife Klara raised three daughters, and decided that their
specialist subject would be chess. He trained the girls in chess
from when they were very small. Despite their intense training, the
girls were happy and well adjusted.
Their youngest daughter, Judit, was a child prodigy. At age five,
she beat a family friend in chess without even looking at the board.
She started competing in tournaments at age six. Eventually at age
15, Judit achieved the status of Grandmaster and became the youngest
person to do so. She has beaten Anatoli Karpov, Garry Kasparov,
Boris Spassky, and six other world champions. Her older sisters are
Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia.
Judit Polgár was ranked number 36 in the world on the July 2012 FIDE
rating list with an Elo rating of 2709, the only woman on FIDE's Top
100 Players list, and has been ranked as high as eighth in 2005.
Last month, March 2013 she was awarded the Order of Merit of the
Republic of Hungary Commander's Cross with Star.